Are customers the problem?

Customer experience is integral to a business’s brand strategy but all too often companies tend to view it as the next thing to sort out – once all the other problems have been fixed.

For many organisations, delighting their customers can represent a short cut to better business performance and create new opportunities for growth.

Understanding these opportunities requires a clearly defined Customer Experience Strategy that identifies the issues that customers face in buying and using the business’s products and services and provides a focused programme of improvement.

M&M(&M)

Customer Experience Strategy addresses three Ms: Mission, Measures and Means, and answers the following questions:

• What is our customer experience mission? Are we aiming to deliver a great customer experience to all customers at all times, some customers or no customers? All of these are viable strategies but very often they are not clearly spelt out, in which case the chances of getting staff to deliver the right experience are low.
• How do we measure our customer performance? What do we know about what our customers think of us? Have we got the right measures and how do they link to motivation and reward?
• What are the means of achieving the mission? What change initiatives do we need and what resources do we require? How do we engage all staff in delivering the mission?

Getting an answer to these questions can be achieved quite quickly by making use of the embedded knowledge in the senior leadership team and the customer-facing parts of the business to enable a strategy to be clarified in a relatively short period of time with the right amount of focused effort. The result is increased clarity and focus on the way forward to build the right customer experience.